Reading through the Starbucks bit I saw the same old Reuters report stuff which is misleading at best.

Also, their estimate of total tax avoidance by Starbucks is £150m. And how do they figure this out? Well, just £10m for each of the 15 years Starbucks was in the UK… Tucked away at the bottom, like nobody would take an interest in their methodology.

Well, I know that plenty of people have found this blog through googling for an estimate of Starbucks corporation tax liability.

By the way, if that is how you got here, the answer is zero. As far as anybody who is not Starbucks or HMRC can objectively say is that it looks like avoidance by Starbucks equals nil.

Starbucks don’t think they avoided anything. They’ve never actually said that they avoided tax.

In fact, to artificially manufacture a corporation tax liability they’re having to disallow expenditure and create double taxation to create a tax charge.

Ie they’re having to disregard the “spirit of the law” to even get a liability.

On a deontological moral basis that is as morally repugnant as tax avoidance.